It’s 5:30 in the evening and I head out into the crisp winter air. I am getting late; I have to be somewhere in half an hour. Luckily, a bus to my desired destination is parked right next to the NAC building, nearly empty. I hop in and take a comfortable window seat on the left. I love travelling by bus. Although I know I will be a little late by the virtue of my chosen means of transport, I am going to enjoy the little trip to New Baneshwor.
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Of course, in real life, things seldom turn out the way you want them to. Before long all the empty seats are taken. In another five minutes, every inch of the standing room is filled: by young college students in colorful uniforms, housewives returning home with shopping bags and folks like me headed home after work. You can now hear the person next to you breathe.
Much to my relief, the bus shudders into life. There is no point in waiting now. The 50-seater with at least 100 souls on board can accommodate no more, try as the young conductor in star-spangled buzz cut might to pack more people in like gundruk. So we finally get going.
It’s another couple of minutes when we reach Ratnapark and the darn things stops again. Rather alarmingly the driver kills the engine.
Soon we can hear ominous thuds over our heads. With no room on the inside, others who want to get on are being routed to the top of the bus. In another five minutes even the little carriage on the terrace is filled with people. I am starting to wonder if the frayed tires will support all this weight.
Packed cheek-by-jowl for 15 minutes now, some people are starting to get restless. “It’s all due to the bloody Indians,” someone from the back mutters.
“Why blame Indians, it’s the dhotis in our midst who have invited them in!” comes an anonymous reply. Some people laugh. But most others are plain angry. Obscenities soon start raining down on Madheshis and Indians.
They have a good reason to be pissed. A big bully is forcing your country to follow its diktat, a country you have learned to love, and, intermittently, hate, like any true love story. But you probably didn’t realize you loved your country so much until someone threatened its very existence. How dare! Don’t they know we are sons and daughters of Bir Gorkhalis? Like our brave khukuri-wielding ancestors, we will chop off the heads of these bastards trying to sell our country to the highest bidder.
But, then, many other Nepalis blame their own countrymen for using the same Gorkhali nationalism to oppress them. When your own treat you as second-class citizens and deny you even basic respect as human beings, these dissidents ask, why wouldn’t outsiders try to play up the divide to its advantage?
Makes you think. Now you feel a bit of their pain because you have been forced to. Otherwise, safely ensconced within the confines of Nepal khaldo, you had learned to conveniently tune out bad vibes from outside the valley. So long as you were not bothered, you didn’t give two hoots about what was happening out there all these years. And when these disenfranchised people finally summoned the courage to speak up for their rights, you look at them with horror. You pretend as if you didn’t even know they could speak.
It’s now a scientifically proven fact that negative emotions narrow down focus. The more emotional you are the more amenable you are to only listen to those who hold similar views. Soon you find yourself into an echo-chamber were voices from the other side simply doesn’t register. You get more and more certain of your beliefs, and the idea of ‘compromising’ starts to appear like an anathema. How can’t you compromise on your ideals!
Before you realize it, everything about the other side stirs your basest instincts. You want to lash out. If it means using violence to impose your views, so be it. After all, you are right, and if you are right, they are wrong, and if they are wrong, you have every right to employ every means possible to impose your views.
But what can we do? We are helpless. At the end of the day we are all animals with selfish genes, programmed to first think of our own self and of our clan. How do you change this DNA-encoded fact of life? This, after all, is what makes Pahades inherently different from Madheshis.
If so, what is the point of talking, right? Why not simply pick up our swords and machetes and set upon the other side? If might is right, you’d hate to be proven wrong.
biswas.baral@gmail.com
